This invention relates generally to the art of dispensing and more particularly to an apparatus for dispensing and conveying plastic articles.
Dispensing of articles in automatic fashion has been of significant interest in the transition from manual processing to machine processing of various items. Dispensing techniques have been particularly well-developed in the area of packaging. Examples of such technology include the automatic dispensing of plastic bags, one at a time, by having such bags arranged in a shingled relationship along a one another utilizing heat seals between individual bags. The overall object of such arrangement is to facilitate the dispensing of such bags utilizing automated equipment.
Associated with such technology in the packaging art are various items of rigid or semi-rigid plastic material which must be dispensed one at a time in order to have some association with a bag or a packaged article.
One such device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,270,874 to Hilton, where individual plastic bag closures such as the type normally used on bread packages are arranged together in a unitary, side-by-side relationship with scores between individual articles to facilitate the severance of individual articles from the unitary strip. Such articles are severed by merely bending the strip at the point of score. This product is arranged primarily for manual dispensing.
A dispensing mechanism is described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,939,147 to Jacobson, wherein curtain hooks are arranged for automatic dispensing, one at a time, such that the clips are stacked together and connected together by a spline which maintains the hooks in the stacked relationship, and facilitates loading into a magazine where they are dispensed one at a time from the stack.
Another dispensing device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,165,968 to Anstett wherein a plastic nailing strip is utilized to connect together individual nail articles for the purpose of dispensing the articles one at a time with automated equipment. A similar device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,357,761 to Lagas et al.
In facilitating the marketing of retail items, it has been known in the prior art to utilize rigid thermoplastic hooks or hanger attachments to individual articles for displaying such articles in a retail environment. In the past such hooks have been dispensed from a loose cartridge for stapling or other means of attachment to a marketable item. Such individual hooks have been arranged within magazines manually in loose stacks. Such arrangement has required great skill on the part of the operator in order to assure loading of large numbers of such hooks in a stacked relationship. Essentially, such loading requires movement of large numbers of hooks within a stack by utilizing only hand pressure at both ends to maintain the stack in alignment, while hoping that the central area of the stack did not collapse to produce a disoriented array of hooks which must be again manually restacked for purposes of loading into a dispensing magazine.
In the art of producing plastic bags with hooks therein, various devices have been utilized. Such are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,429,498, 3,777,970, 3,782,622, and 4,385,722.
There is disclosed in U.S. Patent No. 4,590,610 to Rhyne a process of producing a bag having a hook therein. The bag thus produced has a plurality of seals to permit article insertion and inspection.
While these processes of dispensing, conveying, and of forming bags with hooks therein are efficacious, there is significant room for advancement in the art.